Although on a small island you’re never very far from the coast, twenty kilometers was too far. I wasn’t frightened by the presence of those carcasses; what terrified me was that the limpet shell might have penetrated Ismael’s gum. It made no sense: the infection, the dentist had assured us, had to do with the growth of the flesh. According to him, the body tends to fill cavities, but sometimes fails in that endeavor. I picked up a shell and put it to my nose; at first I could only smell volcanoes, their rocky bodies. Then I perceived the foul smell of Ismael’s mouth, of my non-husband’s gum, but I put it down to my olfactory imagination or tiredness. As the subtle smell became a source of pestilence, it forced me to turn around, thinking that Ismael was behind me. For me, ghosts are never the spirits of strangers. They are the people I love most dearly. I threw the shell far away and on my next outing avoided any communion with the silent earth. Instead, I took Highway 704 to an unnamed turn-off that led to the coastal zone of Timanfaya Park. There was no silence since the waves were breaking against the black cliffs; I went down to the beach and spent the afternoon there, surrounded by pebbles and every imaginable form of shell, including limpets. The Atlantic smelled of stagnant seaweed, and I clung to that rank smell as a sort of explanation for what had happened. I clung to it without conviction, as a predictable line of argument; it was clear that the smell of the seaweed was as mild as that of the sea anemones on the coast of Cádiz, while Ismael’s mouth made you think of bile.

That night my non-husband greeted me with shining eyes that skittered around in the darkness. The windows were closed, as if Ismael was protecting the room from the exterior sunniness, or more like: as if he wanted to shield his new smell. Outside, the air had already cooled, which accentuated the embarrassing stink of his mouth.

“Why have you closed all the windows?”

He smiled at me over the screen of his laptop. His eyes reminded me of crickets.

“Sorry, I hadn’t realized,” he said.